The president of the United States is a huge white supremacist, but luckily our media is there to keep him in check—by obsessively congratulating itself for quoting him accurately.

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To look at the coverage of Donald Trump’s “shithole countries” comments, you would think that the biggest issue facing America was whether or not various media outlets would use the word “shithole” in their reporting.

Well don’t worry folks—they did! And the republic is still standing because of it.

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Look at these brave people from NPR writing a sequel to The Post about why they decided to accurately quote the most powerful person in the world. But don’t worry—they will warn their viewers first.

We know why an exception was made. It’s because the president of the United States said “shithole” and that’s news. Wow, I did the whole article right there!

The Times dutifully quoted standards editors doing the right thing. Emphasis mine to emphasize the bravery:

“It would be futile to mask the word when the language itself, in reference to Haiti and African countries, was so extraordinary,” said The A.P.’s vice president for standards, John Daniszewski.

Phil Corbett, the associate managing editor for standards at The New York Times, said in an email: “It seemed pretty clear to all of us that we should quote the language directly, not paraphrase it. We wanted to be sure readers would fully understand what the story was about.”

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Here’s an equally breathless article from The Washington Post, which broke the “shithole” story. Read on to truly see how the sausage gets made (emphasis mine):

When faced with the question of whether to publish profanity, news editors often err on the side of decorum, cleaning up obscene language that could be off-putting or offensive to readers.

But not when that language comes from the president of the United States.

[...]

The Washington Post, which broke the story, shocked some readers by putting the vulgar word in its headline — a rare occurrence in the paper’s 141-year history.

“When the president says it, we’ll use it verbatim. That’s our policy,” said Martin Baron, The Post’s executive editor. “We discussed it, quickly, but there was no debate.”

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Thank god for the American media. Maybe now that all of these people are done tracking whether they printed a swear or not, they can get around to discussing why almost none of them are willing to call Donald Trump a racist.